Maybe not a surprise because of the buzz surrounding the Keynote, but I still think the amount of changes and improvements to the next generation operating system for the iPhone and iPod touch came as a bit of a surprise. The numbers weren’t that bad either.

Apple’s Marketing Manager for iPhone and iPod, Greg Joswiak kicked off the event by presenting some very impressive snapshot numbers. How about:

There have been 17 million iPhone and 13 million iPod touches sold in the last two years

There are over 30 million devices running the iPhone OS

There are about 50,000 registered application developers, 60 percent of these have never developed for any mobile platform before

The App Store has over 25,000 apps available

The number of downloads from the App Store to date? 800 million (!)

Scott Forstall, Senior VP of iPhone Software Engineering continued to detail some of the features and the over 1,000 new APIs that will become available to developers. Developers can now easily sell additional content directly from within an app, which is likely to be a huge success. If you’re a game developer, users can now purchase additional levels from within your app. Apple will handle all the logistic and take a 30 percent piece of the pie. Not bad. Free apps will however remain free, and will not be able to offer this functionality. Check out some of the other features offered by the new SDK.